hitting publish is scary
Every time I reread something I've written, I'll find something I want to revise or tweak, something that makes me go, hmm, do I really believe this? Did I do enough research, present enough evidence, exhaust the space of alternative hypotheses? Am I just missing something dumb, am I repeating myself, is this something that's already obvious to everybody but me and I should just stop writing and touch grass? And it doesn't really matter whether I'm rereading it before or after I've clicked the Publish button. If I wanted to only publish stuff I have none of these doubts about, I would never publish anything; instead, the best I can do is decide on a point below which I stop caring about the diminishing returns.
But, one way in which it's scarier than it needs to be is that I have the writer's instinct to "write well", make it direct and confident and presentable, cut the verbiage and unnecessary hedging. "Omit needless words", in Strunk & White's immortal phrasing. Conclude with a conclusion, even. The instinct is trained on all the writing of all the other writers I've read over the years, who maybe really are more confident than me, whether or not that's justified, or who become more successful in some part conditioned on how confident they came across to readers. Part of me will emulate them on some mechanical level, even when I really am not confident; when I am endlessly confused about some ideas, decided to write about them to try to sort them out, and maybe made a little progress, but hardly concluded anything... conclusive.
Like, what doubts do I have about my previous post, one day later?
- Some of it is vibes. Concluding the CSS detour with "But I had a guess: it was for themselves." has this air of gravity that is in no way backed up by logic or intuition.
- "Thanks for reading" is a low-status play? Either disastrously clichéd or weirdly vulnerable? What was I thinking? You didn't consent to that. But also I guess you can take it at face value and then it really is kinda just a chill, friendly thing to say? Why am I so cynical?
- A better rationale than posting to support random strangers randomly rabbit-holing is posting for people who already know me to some extent less-randomly rabbit-holing. I'm sure I thought about this somewhere in some draft, but lost the thread; or I tried to adjust my own poorly-distilled phrasing of my prior stance and overshot. Perhaps the distillation makes sense because "is this thing I want to say interesting to some generic online person?" and "is this thing I want to say important to myself in a way that people noticing it could lead to friendships?" are easier questions to answer than "is this thing I want to say interesting to any of the specific friends I would expect to read it?", which is ultimately awkwardly between the others.
- Being popular, making popular people-pleasing posts, is instrumentally useful to forming connections either way, since more people see your post. Posting .01% content into the void as your primary strategy clearly won't work, you need 10,000 people to see it, and no algorithm or lack thereof will give that to you. Well, that's what eagerly liking and replying to others' posts is about, maybe? Or, telling people to follow you out of band, at parties and whatever. Or, cohost-compatible opt-in discoverability e.g. via hashtags is probably enough as well. But I guess the flip side of that is I think I find myself anti-connecting with people, less compelled to roll the dice on their .01% posts, when they post something generic. It's unclear that I should project this onto others.
Who was it who wrote about the difficulty of endings on the internet? Robin Sloan, of course. Somehow, the piece looks different from what I remember...